An attempt to revoke approvals for three safe injection sites operating in the city’s core was dismissed by a federal court judge in a decision filed this week.

Operating with the permission of the federal health minister, intravenous drug users are able to inject themselves under supervision at three sites at Boyle McCauley Health Centre, Boyle Street Community Services and the George Spady Centre shelter and detox programs. The supervision allows for overdoses to be reversed and for people to get connected with other social supports like treatment and housing.

The ruling comes as a relief to the sites’ supporters.

“It means that we can continue doing the work we have been doing all along, and it is work that is incredibly crucial in light of the opioid crisis,” said Marliss Taylor, director of Streetworks, one of the organizations that forms Access to Medically Supervised Injection Services Edmonton (AMSISE). The coalition supports the trio of sites in Edmonton sites that together offer 24-hour access.

The first site opened about 11 months ago, and in that time Taylor said there have been nearly 40,000 visits to the three sites, and that 420 overdoses have been reversed.

Last December, the Chinatown and Area Business Association went to court in an effort to quash the federal exemption that allows the sites to operate. The group argued it wasn’t properly consulted, and that three sites is too many when Vancouver, a larger city experiencing a more dire opioid epidemic, has only one.

But in a written decision filed Wednesday, Justice Richard Mosley found there is nothing to prevent the federal health minister from approving sites if they are convinced of the public health need, and there’s nothing to prevent the Edmonton model of three smaller sites set up at pre-existing social agencies.

“In light of the information on the record that most drug injectors in the area would be willing to walk no more than one kilometre, I see nothing unreasonable in expanding the coverage radius by relying on multiple sites,” Mosley wrote in his written reasons for the decision.

Mosley’s findings are disappointing, said the business group’s president Holly Mah.

“We still feel unheard and disregarded,” Mah said in a telephone interview Thursday. Mah said her group is not opposed to safe injection sites, but that they still don’t think three concentrated closely together is reasonable.

“I agree with the respondents that the record before Health Canada provided evidence of a health need and little evidence of a public safety risk that was not a result of pre-existing condition in the area.”

AMSISE and the federal government were both respondents in the case, and the Canadian Drug Policy Coalition gained intervener status in the case to also argue in favour of the sites.

In finding no need to interfere in Health Canada’s decision, Mosley also noted that conditions imposed on the sites to carry out careful monitoring and reporting on any consequences to the community — including on crime rates — means that concerns that arise can be addressed when the time comes for exemption status to be renewed.

Mah said there’s not anything left for her community to do but to forge ahead with efforts to revitalize the area north of downtown. For years, Chinatown business owners, and residents in surrounding neighbourhoods, have called on the city to help with the effects that they say a concentration of poverty and social challenges have had on their community.